Worsened conflict

AI enables development of weapons of mass destruction

"AI is already enabling the development of weapons which could cause mass destruction —including new weapons that themselves use AI capabilities, such as Lethal Autonomous Weapons [2],10 and the potential use of AI to speed up the development of other potentially dangerous technologies, such as engineered pathogens (as discussed in Section 2)."

AI enables automation of military decision-making

"One concern here is humans not remaining in the loop for some military decisions, creating the possibility of unintentional escalation because of: • Automated tactical decision-making, by ‘in-theatre’ AI systems (e.g. border patrol systems start accidentally firing on one another), leading to either: tactical-level war crimes,11 or strategic-level decisions to initiate conflict or escalate to a higher level of intensity—for example, countervalue (e.g. city-) targeting, or going nuclear [62]. • Automated strategic decision-making, by ‘out-of-theatre’ AI systems—for example, conflict prediction or strategic planning systems giving a faulty ‘imminent attack’ warning [20]."

AI-induced strategic instability

"For example, AI could undermine nuclear strategic stability by making it easier to discover and destroy previously secure nuclear launch facilities [30, 46, 49]. AI may also offer more extreme first-strike advantages or novel destructive capabilities that could disrupt deterrence, such as cyber capabilities being used to knock out opponents’ nuclear command and control [15, 29]. The use of AI capabilities may make it less clear where attacks originate from, making it easier for aggressors to obfuscate an attack, and therefore reducing the costs of initiating one. By making it more difficult to explain their military decisions, AI may give states a carte blanche to act more aggressively [20]. By creating a wider and more vulnerable attack surface, AI-related infrastructure may make war more tempting by lowering the cost of offensive action (for example, it might be sufficient to attack just data centres to do substantial harm), or by creating a ‘use-them-or- lose-them’ dynamic around powerful yet vulnerable military AI systems. In this way, AI could exacerbate the ‘capability- vulnerability paradox’ [22], where the very digital technologies that make militaries effective on the battlefield also introduce critical new vulnerabilities."

Resource conflicts driven by AI development

"AI development may itself become a new flash point for conflicts—causing more conflict to occur— especially conflicts over AI-relevant resources (such as data centres, semiconductor manufacturing facilities and raw materials)."